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Physics > Physics and Society

Title:Korean Family Name Distribution in the Past

Abstract: We empirically study the genealogical trees of ten families for about five
centuries in Korea. Although each family tree contains only the paternal part,
the family names of women married to the family have been recorded, which
allows us to estimate roughly the family name distributions for the past five
hundred years. Revealed is the fact that the unique Korean family name
distribution, characterized by a logarithmic form of the cumulative
distribution and an exponentially decaying rank-size plot often called the Zipf
plot, has remained unchanged for a long time. We discuss the implications of
our results within a recently suggested theoretical model and compare them with
observations in other countries in which power-law forms are abundantly found.